The Belgrade Centre for Human Rights has published its new annual report Human Rights in Serbia 2025. The 2025 report seeks to document, from a human rights perspective, the key developments that shaped student and civic protests in Serbia.
Protests became the central framework of social action in 2025. Social polarization took the form of direct confrontation, as increasingly repressive measures by the authorities, accompanied by serious and systemic human rights violations, were met with strong public resistance and citizens’ refusal to remain passive observers and subjects.
The report documents patterns of pressure and human rights violations that marked 2025 – from restrictions on the freedoms of assembly, expression, and association, to police violence and the prosecution of protest participants, as well as pressure on journalists, activists, civil society organisations, teachers, and the academic community.
The report is further underscored by data illustrating the scale of repression: according to the Ministry of the Interior, 1,636 individuals were prosecuted in connection with the protests between late June and early September 2025, while the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia (NUNS) recorded 344 incidents involving journalists by mid-December 2025. The report also examines the protest of 15 March in Belgrade, one of the largest civic gatherings in Serbia’s recent history, as well as allegations concerning the use of an unidentified sonic device against those assembled.
The 2025 report also looks at the institutional response to the protests, the state of media freedom, the position of human rights defenders, and the reactions of international actors to the deterioration of human rights and the rule of law in Serbia.
Since its establishment, one of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights’ core activities has been monitoring the human rights situation in Serbia, as well as analysing the legal framework and its implementation in practice. We published our first annual report in 1998. The 2025 report is our 28th annual report on the state of human rights in Serbia and is available in English at this LINK.
